CS2 Overwatch Is Back as the VACNet Labeling Portal: How It Works and Who Gets In

Invited players watch short clips of suspected cheaters and label what they see, and on October 21, 2026 Valve sent a new wave of invites and credited labelers with better match quality. The verdicts never ban the player in the clip.

They train VACNet, Valve's machine-learning anti-cheat, and access is still invite-only.

On this page For a month, the loudest comment under every CS2 patch was the same one: Valve found time for pet chickens, a sticker slot on the C4 and a photo book for your birds, but where is the anti-cheat update?

On October 21, 2026, Valve finally said something. It went live in August through a small client update with no line in the release notes, more than a month before the first chicken egg dropped. Valve is not saying, and the timing fits both stories.

What happens after you submit a verdict is different. The player in the clip gets nothing from you. Your label becomes training data for VACNet, Valve’s machine-learning anti-cheat, and any ban comes later from the model.

CS2 went almost three years without any human review that regular players could take part in, and a detection model trained on CS2 footage should do better than one that learned on CS:GO demos.